Problem
LinkedIn enables professionals to be more productive and successful by helping them stay informed and build meaningful relationships. A productive content ecosystem relies on a healthy balance of content contributors and consumers that share and learn knowledge about their industries, careers and professional interests. For many members, however, it feels scary or risky to contribute to the platform since their actions are tied to their professional identities.
Design an experience that helps novice contributors overcome the barriers to sharing.
Why is this problem important to LinkedIn?
The current content in LinkedIn feeds is not representative of the average users. Most of the content is currently generated by 10% of power users and rest 90% of the users fall in the category of lurkers. In addition to that, only 40% of the users visit LinkedIn on a daily basis. This is not ideal for several reasons:
Trending/Popular topics If LinkedIn looks to derive a sample size for trending/popular topics, is it getting an unrepresentative sample because 90% of its users are not contributing to the feed.
Search Search engine results pages (SERP) within LinkedIn are mainly sorted based on how many other sites link to each destination. When 10% of users do most of the linking, we risk having search relevance getting skewed with what's useful for the remaining 90% of users.
Signal-to-noise ratio Discussion groups drown in flames and low-quality postings, making it hard to identify meaningful content. Many users stop reading comments because they don't have time to wade through the swamp of postings from people with little to say.
Users
I assumed the user base to be consisting of novice users of the platform who are considered non-influencers with less than 2000 followers.
Primary research
I created a survey with the following questions and sent it out to 20 participants falling in the user group of novice LinkedIn users out of which 15 responded to the survey.
What level are you at in your career?
How often do you engage with the LinkedIn Feed (Read, Post, Like, or Comment)?
How do you typically engage with the LinkedIn Feed?
What device(s) do you commonly use to engage with the LinkedIn Feed?
How valuable is the LinkedIn feed to your professional interests?
How important is it to you to manage your online reputation?
How important is it to you to manage your online privacy?
Do you know that your LinkedIn feed activity is visible to others?
How does this make you feel?
Do you have additional comments, suggestions or feedback about the LinkedIn Feed or your engagement with it?
Qualitative observations
Maximum number of participants didn’t feel the need to post while few others had different experiences with the platform.
Insights from user research
Novice users are hesitant to post online due to
They do not have guidance and insight from the platform on what content to contribute to.
The incentives of contributing to a professional network are not obvious enough to them.
They do not think the community will be/is welcoming enough.
They feel intimidated by power users who are usually influencers and contribute to engaging feeds.
Initially when they contributed, their experiences or feedback they received was not good enough which forced them to go into lurking mode.
They have substance but do not have confidence yet in the value of it.
Understanding competitor products
Design process
I decided to follow the Double Diamond approach of problem solving since it would allow me to explore several solutions and converge them back into one unified solution.
Design considerations
After inferring the insights derived from user research, it was important to keep the following design considerations in mind while designing the solution.
Make contributing easy for everyone in terms of the UI. Design contribution tools that scale in complexity, while easing usage for light users.
Encourage editing over creating. Blank pages are scary. Create templates, rough examples that can be easily edited, content suggestions, and tons of examples that help eliminate the fear factor.
Reward participants. Incentivize users for participation and provide them with a sense of belonging with the community.
Make participation a side effect. Let users participate with zero effort by making their contributions a side effect of something else they're doing.
Create smaller “spaces” for shy people to share and engage.
Provide ability to create content anonymously for some content like polls.
Exploring solutions for user needs
1.Provide more options to interact with highly ranked profiles like tagging them for an answer, people who do not mind engaging more with the community and helping others
Providing options to power users if they prefer to be tagged in posts for answering questions
2. Show more meaningful content like - if someone is ‘open to recruiters’ then show interview preparation tips, prompt asking for help to prepare for interviews in groups, share resources, knowledge in groups etc, borrow books etc. These themed posts could be detailed or over the top. It can be something as simple as “What’s your office view today” or “What is your #1 goal this week?”
3. Gamify the experience of posting - conversation starter, most approachable, rising star in the community
4. Small prompts contained in bubbles might prompt the user to post on the platform - Do you know that people who posted more on groups, had more profile visitors and had a greater chance of being noticed by recruiters?
5. Notifications after user posts showing insights, profile views, comments to users which already exists on the platform
6. Live stream with AMA style (ask me anything) sessions, free training with LinkedIn learning in a more authentic, transparent way. build rapport and get answers to questions instantly.
7. Allow creating polls anonymously
8. Show feeds from users with similar profile - like feed from data scientists, designers, marketing professionals etc. Topics of interest showing trending topics based on topics of interest. Leverage machine learning to filter out topics not engaging to the user.
User flow
As soon as the user logs in, user is prompted with engagement bubbles to start a thread, share a tip or ask a question.
When user clicks on any of the bubbles/ start a post widget, a pop-up is presented to the user asking for the kind of content they wish to create.
Based on the user’s selection, the pop-up changes to guide the user through the kind of content they wish to create.
Taking user through the next steps of selecting the audience. User has the option to choose a smaller audience (group) or to his entire network. User also has the option to post anonymously.
Some of content might prompt the user to provide active participation like the live-streaming feature.
The user can engage with an influencer in real time and gets an opportunity to develop strong ties within their professional network.
The influencer/ power user is provided with options for choosing their level of engagement with their network or audience.
Visual explorations
Key interactions
How to ensure quality of content on the platform?
Wisdom of crowds can be leveraged to filter out engaging and rich content from not so great ones using concepts like upvoting / downvoting content.
Give extra prominence to contributions from people who've proven their value, as indicated by their reputation ranking.
Possible integrations with other LinkedIn applications
LinkedIn learning can be used to encourage more participation on online community or groups. A subset of the videos can be made available for free and used to promote the course. This can ensure active participation in online communities as well as increase audience to the course when it appears in the feed section.
LinkedIn Talent Solutions can be used to connect with people having the desired skillset for a company and promote taking courses, engage with online community of learners, integrate interview coding challenges with platforms like HackerRank, Top Coder, LeetCode providing the applicants with more visibility for the recruiter. The recruiter in turn also gets an overview of the interests of the candidate and his performance before speaking with them formally.
Closing thoughts
I thoroughly enjoyed working on this assignment. If I was given more time, I would have loved to explore categories of reasons why novice users choose not to engage with the platform. Identifying these patterns would help design solutions that would exactly address those issues. In addition to that, I would have conducted a formative round of usability testing in order to understand if this solution solves the problem.
Crowdsourcing is one of my favorite topics in the field of Computer Supported Collaborative Work. When I was presented with a challenge on these lines, I took time to understand and explore more about reasoning behind the roles of lurkers and contributors in social media platforms like LinkedIn that has a professional aspect to it that naturally raises concerns and barriers to a novice user. I hope my solution addresses at least a few of those barriers and helps build confidence in the novice user in their journey of becoming a successful professional.
References
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/community-is-dead-long-live-mega-collaboration/
https://www.businessinsider.com/90-percent-of-user-gen-site-visitors-are-lurkers-and-its-ok-2010-8
https://www.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/advan.00200.2016
[1] Nonnecke, B., Andrews, D., Preece, J. (2006). “Non-public and public online community participation: Needs, attitudes and behaviour.” Electronic Commerce Res (2006) 6, p. 7-20. Google Scholar
[2] Muller, M. (2012). “Lurking as Personal Trait or Situational Disposition? Lurking and Contributing in Enterprise Social Media.” CSCW 2012, February 11-15, Seattle, Washington. Google Scholar